


guess that's how i'm built

by worry



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, No Dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 06:37:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13289136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worry/pseuds/worry
Summary: The underlying truth of all: he is sick, diseased - he is tainted by each world he visits, every atmosphere with its hands around his neck, growing tighter and tight. He is built from shattered stars and shattered worlds and all of the pieces fallen and pasted together look like this: the body of Vislor Turlough.





	guess that's how i'm built

**Author's Note:**

> So, I got the Enlightenment novelization a few days ago, and there's a very, very interesting heartbreaking passage that can be read [here](http://vislorturlough.tumblr.com/post/169241674101/im-going-to-fucking-die). If you don't wanna read that, it canonizes the idea that Turlough would rather die himself than kill the Doctor - and also that Turlough is definitely a trauma survivor. So me, being Me, simply had to write a character study focused around those two things. I just had to. It's a requirement.

Turlough is built from shattered stars, and on Earth he is born in the dust of old books, the sting of a fire. He deconstructs himself in his mind, on the very first day - here is the heart, here is the cage, here is every fact holding his body together, every lesson he has ever learned wrapped green-vine around the several, small bones in his hand. The fact: there are many things inside of him, like lust and desire, like a shaken, omnipresent fear, like. The fact: if you combined everything rattling around in him and viewed it all in small, microscopic pieces - you would find rot, you would find brittle foundations, you would find whatever-composes-dreams-in-a-mind - you’d find everything inside of him, every single opposing force of the universe, every aspect of a personality buried in his stomach, except good. He is not capable of good.

 

He thinks that he was, once, prosperous, but “prosperous” has too many meanings, too many variables to count or hold down. You can prosper into serenity, night-blooming, or you can prosper into calculation. Turlough has indefinitely prospered, but instead of floral he has become nightshade - a poison to touch, forbidden berries staining fingertips, bones of the hand flipped up.

 

Brendon is bearable, in the beginning. Nothing happens during the first few months - he settles in, adjusts to the idea that he will be stuck here forever - forever - until he dies, or is killed, or simply fades away in the mind. He deserves to fade, also. It is a fitting fate, an appropriate demise. He is, to his core, beginning, and end, entirely irredeemable.

 

He even forms a friendship in the second month - a boy, Ibbotson, who takes an unlikely interest in helping Turlough with his academic struggles. Ibbotson is, to be sharp and blunt, the only student whose interest in _helping -_ even simply acknowledging - Turlough seems true and genuine.

 

It is absolutely sickening. Turlough does not deserve this.

 

The underlying truth of all: he is sick, diseased - he is tainted by each world he visits, every atmosphere with its hands around his neck, growing tighter and tight. He is built from shattered stars and shattered worlds and all of the pieces fallen and pasted together look like this: the body of Vislor Turlough.

 

In some other timeline, he deserves this. His main etched-in idea of survival is _survival,_ despite any opposing force, and any course of action is acceptable if it furthers his existence, if it keeps him safe. And the lengths that he will go to in order to maintain that safety terrify him.

 

His fourth month at Brendon is when the trouble sparks, builds itself up already sentient. Emotional weakness, apparently, is something you cannot afford to have in a boys’ sixth-form school and he begins to see it as it _truly_ is: a vast wilderness, a quiet forest in calm that morphs to hunt - Turlough animalfrail in the middle of the field, two arrows in what could be his heart if he was capable of good, two bullets lodged on each temple. Two vacant holes in his chest. Two hands to clean the blood.

 

He retaliates, finds his claws, rips teeth out of the fallen predator’s mouth and makes them his. (The lengths that he will go to—)

 

The first time that Turlough is cruel to his only friend, the bricks in Turlough’s composure unfurl and compose themselves again; he is a new being, now, something new to Earth and the being that he always should have been: all rough edges & bitter meat. Ibbotson’s lips tremble but Turlough does not feel guilt. Guilt and pain are weaknesses, lined up like the weapons he is taught about in history class - they teach you _war_ on Earth and that is the only similarity to home, the only bright star in the sky, so he immerses himself in the pages of war, the words of hatred. There is something about _becoming_ and _metamorphosis_ churning in his mind, but the implication of such an idea is that he would prosper, that he would become beautiful and wondrous - instead he swallows himself and spits up the unedible, unchangeable parts. Look at what he is willing to endure, look at the skin on his hands.

 

There is no good in humanity so he is human but he is also better than this humanity - the other schoolboys push him into walls and enlighten his body colors of black and blue and purple, and Turlough fights back (his only worth is in violence) (fact:) (his only worth lies in blue and purple) (his only purpose as a bone fracture), Turlough learns to fight back, learns all of the weak points in human consciousness. It is in self defense, he pleads, _it was their fault,_ but he is the only one who gets the punishment. They beat him, and they beat him, and they beat him; more sick skin and stinging vessels; the school staff is composed of humanity so he has no safety, no safety. When has he ever had safety? The concept, like his own existence, is too alien, simply too painstaking to define, _oh,_ the lengths that he will go to—

 

the lengths that he will—

 

They actually applaud him, when he forces Ibbotson into the car.

 

It has been a very long time since he has heard noises of admiration - _towards anyone_ \- and when Ibbotson reminds him he isn’t “legally” able to drive, Turlough thinks: _I’m going to die here._ He is going to die, on Earth, alone. Turlough has pushed every positive aspect of himself and his surroundings _away_ and underground and he is going to die underneath the stars, looking up into space and using the last mental capacity to think of escape plans - like maybe - _maybe -_ maybe - if he wishes hard enough he will go home. They teach him fairy tales here too, like Earth is a tower, or Earth is a poison apple, or Earth is a spindle on a spinning wheel. Reality blends, and -

 

when he crashes the car, he does not die. Not in the “traditional” sense of dying, i.e _death, noun, the action or fact of dying or being killed; the end of the life of a person or organism._ The paralyzed part of him fades away when the man appears, saying _I am a friend, I am your guardian -_ Turlough deserves neither - and asks Turlough to do something he is capable of, to test the lengths that he will go to: _you will be destroying one of the most evil creatures in the universe,_ says his Guardian, _he calls himself the Doctor,_ and Turlough imagines himself, for a very small moment, as the hero of his own story, destroying evil. In the picture: he has a sword, he holds the evil Doctor’s head in one hand and everyone around him is applauding again, admiring, he can do _good -_

 

(the lengths that he will go to—)

 

\-- but then the fantasy is torn from him and he realizes that, regardless of the Doctor’s morality, a life would still end at his hands, someone dead because of _him,_ strangled by his darkness. He doesn’t know if he can go that far.

 

(He thinks that his hesitation could mean redemption—)

 

(but then the Guardian offers him a chance to leave Earth, to break free from this all, and he does the unthinkable, takes the great fall: he says _“yes.”)_

 

Turlough has made many mistakes throughout the course of his life; mistakes linger inside of him, go intramuscular and settle into what he has become. Every move he makes - mistake. Life is a strategy game, always testing the technology of Vislor Turlough, looking for errors and flaws in code.

 

When he sees the Doctor for the first time - covered-drowned in cricket gear, bright glow on his face - he looks like the antithesis of evil. Turlough knows that first-glance looks can be like posion apples & fairy tales with unhappy endings - so he pushes down the doubt, knows that the Guardian can feel what he feels, and raises a rock to the Doctor’s golden-light head -

 

Boo—

 

[He thinks that he is going to die here and he would rather _die_ than—]

 

[than end—]

 

[than _kill_ —]

 

[he is sick and diseased and broken, his fingers as blades & his teeth as blades & his body burning to the touch—]

 

—m.

 

He is blasted backwards. The blast comes from the Doctor’s hands as he plays with controls and works towards an end goal and _knows beautiful things -_ things that Turlough understands, things that are infinitely more important than the things taught at Brendon - and Turlough—

 

Turlough despises every part of the Doctor’s being. The Doctor is a good man. The Doctor is the kind of good that Turlough thought didn’t exist; he is pure in his intentions, he only wants to heal - a _doctor -_ and Turlough despises him, Turlough abhors him, Turlough loathes him—

 

he’s never going to go home.

 

It is too soon to make decisions he will regret (he is offered _freedom,_ remember, carved into his own skin), so they separate paradoxes, they bring meaningful ends, they visit sickness and lose Nyssa and they save and they save and they save and the ultimate, neverending thought hides _here:_ with the Doctor, he has freedom. He can go home. He can go anywhere in the universe, he can become all, without being forced to end a wholesome life.

 

All of his mistakes climb on top of each other and form and morph into one being, one vicious giant; and that giant has big big teeth, that giant picks him up - the biggest mistake of his life, in every literal and metaphorical way, his mistakes clawing at him, his mistakes in the form of the Black Guardian and a sailboat in space.

 

He still despises the Doctor.

 

Turlough finds himself in a corridor with the Guardian’s hands wrapped around his neck like the weight of all bad wrapped around his neck like a noose wrapped around his neck and Turlough finds himself thinking _I am going to die here_ and Turlough -

 

for once, he does not fight back. He would rather _die_ than kill the Doctor, so he will die. So he jumps off of the ship and hopes for his own death. His agreement disgusts him, his own mind and every essence of his being disgusts him - he is, ultimately, despicable, and he does not deserve the man that he despises.

 

He is not lucky enough, to die.

 

Instead the Doctor saves him, and Turlough hates him even more, hatred forming and folding deeper. Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he see the lack of light in Turlough’s formation?

 

Light. Turlough is offered light.

 

With this light, with this diamond, he would have the ability to Become - one could buy _galaxies_ with this, Turlough could go back to everyone who has ever hurt him and whisper _look at me now, look at what I possess, look at how I have thrived despite your cruelty -_ and Turlough knows now, he must - he has decided. He’d give up the Doctor for this diamond, for status and power, for falsified redemption—

 

he looks over at the Doctor to see his reaction—

 

and the Doctor is simply staring into Turlough’s distance, kindly, a look that says _I will understand,_ and there is so much k i n d n e s s inside of the Doctor and love that Turlough cannot grasp and now he faces it, looks into its eyes, swallows it down bones-and-all: he admires the Doctor, he loves the Doctor, and he knew this before but now it is completely clear, a beautiful reveal: he would rather _die_ than harm the Doctor. He would undergo any pain and suffering, if meant the Doctor’s safety and continuation, and that fact is the most terrifying thing he has ever had to hold the hand of - he _had_ to despise the Doctor. It would be - easier, to kill the Doctor, if Turlough convinced himself of hatred.

 

He thinks that this might make him - _good,_ or that it changes things, mutates the world; now, he might be capable of good. Of love. Of pure intentions. Of living, rather than simply surviving.

 

Turlough looks into the Doctor’s eyes for a final time, and shoves the diamond violently at the Black Guardian.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! :) Kudos + comments _highly_ appreciated.


End file.
